Angela Bassett Joins Black Panther Cast
The pedigree of the first stand alone Black Panther film continues to impress. Marvel and Walt Disney Studios have just announced that Academy Award-nominated actress Angela Bassett has joined the cast. For the legions fo Bassett fans, who currently get to see her on Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story, the news that she'll be playing Ramonda, the mother of T’Challa, aka Black Panther, is huge.
Bassett is joining an extremely talented team...
Composer Joby Talbot on the Many Musical Influences in Sing
With stars like Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane, and Scarlett Johansson lending their voices, Sing is sure to be the must see family movie this Christmas (the official release date is December 21). The anthropomorphic animation about following your dreams features music by composer Joby Talbot. In a movie about a singing competition, the music becomes a character all its own. Talbot’s task was to weave together a score amidst a story featuring over 100 songs made popular by artists from Aerosmith to Sir Mix-A-Lot...
From Storyboard to Screen: Behind the Scenes of Disney’s Moana
Disney is in on the joke about “princess movies” in the new animated feature Moana (in theaters Nov. 23). In the film, a road trip by sea in which a young Polynesian woman named Moana leaves her island home to find the demi-god Maui and return a lost object to its right home, there is more than one joke about the title character’s princess credentials.
The Credits recently sat down with Hyrum Osmond,...
Can you Find the Guardians of the Galaxy Easter Egg?
Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has been saying for a while now that eagle eyed fans have still not found a major easter egg in the first film. How is it possible, in an age of hyper-vigiliant film and TV watching, with the numerous Reddit threads devoted to deciphering every movie and show’s tiniest detail, that this easter egg is still out there, unseen?
Ever since Gunn teased fans, they’ve been hard at work looking at every single frame of the film...
Sonic Soul: Talking to Manchester by the Sea’s Sound Designer
What does a sound editor on a film do? While most people could reasonably explain the role of editor, costume designer or cinematographer (and think they know what a producer does—often they don't), it's a safe bet that your average movie lover would have a tough job explaining the role of sound editor. "The way a movie sounds, it can be elusive even to the director," says seasoned sound designer and supervising sound editor Jacob Ribicoff. With a ton of great films under his belt,...
Production Designer Stuart Craig on Fantastic Beasts and How They Came to Be
In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Hogwarts graduate Newt (Eddie Redmayne) crashes his way through New York in 1926, fresh off a steamer ship from London, in hot pursuit of his various ill-trained magical beasts, whom he just can’t seem to keep trapped in a suitcase. After the case gets accidentally swapped with other nondescript brown luggage, Newt’s predicament grows, given that only one of the bags contains an entire fantastic beast-sanctuary. With a muggle in tow,...
Brad Pitt & Marion Cotillard Sizzle in new Allied Clips
It's 1942 in North Africa, and intelligence officer Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) meets French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. They go under cover as a married couple, charged with taking out a high ranking official. Their cover relationships becomes real, but eventually their relationship is threatened by the extreme pressure of the war when Max's handlers declare that Marianne is a Nazi spy.
Directed by Oscar-winner Robert Zemeckis, written by an Oscar-nominated writer (Steven Knight, ...
New Photos Reveal Logan Henchman in his Cyborg Glory
The official Logan Instagram account @wponx, as well as director James Mangold's Twitter feed, have been a great resource for new photos from the film. On Mangold's Twitter feed, we've seen new photos of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine and some fantastic storyboards by artist Gabriel Hardman. On @wponx, we've met Laura, likely Wolverine's new charge (a mutant very much like him, only with a different ratio of claws and a whole lot younger),...
Manchester by the Sea‘s Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan—Part 2
In Part 2 of an interview with writer/director Kenneth Lonergan about his latest release, Manchester by the Sea, which opens Friday, the New York City native speaks about his penchant for acting in his own films, his choice of classical music to accompany a drama like Manchester by the Sea that is set in a working-class milieu and how the current political climate might affect his artistic vision in the future – or not.
For part I,...
Talking to Manchester by the Sea‘s Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan—Part 1
At 54, Kenneth Lonergan has experienced the highs and lows of the movie biz. The filmmaker has basked in the glow of having his directorial debut, 2000’s You Can Count on Me, bestowed with rave reviews and two Academy Award nominations – one for his screenplay and the other for his leading lady, Laura Linney. And he has dealt with the frustration when the running time of his more ambitious sophomore effort, 2011’s Margaret, ...
Two new Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Clip Follow Positive Early Reviews
The early reviews for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are in, and they’re very good. Currently sitting at 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, the first film to be scripted by J.K. Rowling herself is being hailed as “sheer magic” by Newsday’s Rafer Guzman, a surprisingly dark origin story that will appear more to grownups than youngsters by Us Weekly’s Mara Reinstein, and film that has a “spellbinding polish” by indieWIRE’s Eric Kohn (to call out just a few.) With the release date quickly approaching,...
Ghost in the Shell‘s Mind Melting Official Trailer
Director Rupert Sanders Ghost in the Shell remake has been a long time in the coming. It began in 2008 when Steven Spielberg acquired the rights to a live-action adaptation of the original manga by Masamune Shirow. Eventually Sanders took over the project, with Scarlett Johansson stepping into the lead role. That role is a doozy; Johnson plays The Major, a Cyborg counter-cyberterrorist who leads the task force Section 9, with a goal of thwarting cyber criminals and hackers...
Go see Arrival This Weekend
We've been talking about Denis Villeneuve's Arrival since it had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival this past September 1. There couldn't be a more appropriate time for a film about the importance of communication in times of peril then right about now. Arrival's conceit is simple and brilliant: linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with leading an elite team of investigators to decipher what, if anything, the aliens inside the 12 colossal ships that have touched down all across the globe,...
Costume Designer Lynn Falconer on her Vintage Designs in Ouija: Origin of Evil
Ouija: Origin of Evil taps into one of the most iconic eras for horror costumes, the 1960s. Mia Farrow’s blue nightgown in Rosemary’s Baby or Tippi Hedren’s green skirt suit in The Birds have become synonymous with terror. Costume designer Lynn Falconer mastered the era creating gorgeous vintage looks that reach the sinister standards of our favorite horror classics. We spoke with Lynn about mining estate sales for inspiration, preparing for the wear and tear of stunts,...
Loving‘s Breakout Star Ruth Negga on the Role of a Lifetime
If, as expected, Ruth Negga, the breakout star of Loving, snags a best actress nomination, it will likely be met in some corners by furrowed brows and the question, ‘Who’s Ruth Negga?’
They’ll know soon enough. Predominantly a British stage actress who’s played Ophelia at the National Theatre and legendary singer Shirley Bassey in the 2011 BBC biopic Shirley, Negga was born in Addis Ababa to an Irish mother and an Ethiopian father and lived there until she was four before being raised in Limerick and London...
Oscar Watch: Designing the Look of Loving With the DP, Costumer & Production Designer
In telling the true story of a white man and his black wife, director Jeff Nichols nails the late fifties period with uncanny precision. His Oscar-buzzed Loving (opening wide Nov. 11) begins in 1958 when police arrest Richard and Mildred Loving at their own Virginia home in the middle of the night and throw them in jail for being a mixed race couple. Banished from Virginia, Richard and Mildred (played with slow-burn intensity by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) decide to fight back and eventually win a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case declaring all anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional...
Dumbledore and Depp to Appear in Fantastic Beasts Series
As Potterheads around the world gear up for the first installment of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series, there's some exciting confirmation to share about the sequel. Albus Dumbledore will in fact appear in the second part of this series – now expected to include five films instead of three.
Set in the 1926, fans may expect to see a younger Albus (around 44-45 years old) roaming the wizarding world in the second Fantastic Beasts...
Almost Christmas Drops Music Video
The Christmas movie is a staple of our cinematic heritage going back to Frank Capra’s 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart in the iconic role of George Bailey. The very next year, another classic, Miracle on 34th Street, was released, which beat Bad Santa by 56 years in the depiction of a drunken Saint Nick (granted, in the latter film, he's the star). Since then,...
How Arrival’s Production Designer Created an Alien Language
Oscar-nominated production designer Patrice Vermette was tasked with creating an alien language for the new movie Arrival — and although he started by studying the languages used in other films about alien invasion, he ended up “reverse engineering” the language that Amy Adams uses to communicate with the invaders in the new film (in theaters Nov. 10). Vermette took a feelings-first approach to crafting the alien language by thinking about what it said to the audience without words...
Oscar Watch: La La Land‘s Director Damien Chazelle & Star Emma Stone on Their Moving Musical
Oscar-nominated writer/director Damien Chazelle set out to make a genre film with La La Land. Inspired by classic song-and-dance movies such as Singin’ in the Rain and Swing Time, he wanted to create an old-fashioned musical but “keep it grounded” in realism and contemporary Los Angeles.
“It was about trying to use real locations, use a lot of real spaces, then try to dress them up and make them feel a little more magical,”...
